Our New Old House

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]

Will the wonders of my kitchen ever cease?  Maybe.  I worry I’ll start to miss the disgusting walls and the gag-me-with-a-spoon froo froo trim.    And then I start pulling it down and the act of destruction solidifies my rage over the tragedy that is the decorating job done to this poor old classic house.  Case in point:

Behold! My kitchen. It sucks. But not for much longer. Here you see the stupid trim (as I’ve taken to calling it these days) on the left and the area where I pulled the stupid trim down on the right.

Some fascinating wallpaper choices. Just fascinating.

Is that strange golden grainy stuff on the wood sap that has oozed out of the wood?

Anyway, trim is coming down and a new drywall ceiling will be going up very soon.

[tags]wallpaper, photos, kitchen, ceiling[/tags]

Phew! What a busy couple of weeks it’s been!  I’ll have lots and lots of blog posts coming your way to tell you all about everything (with pictures!)

Today I sent a response to the lady who used to live in my house.  When I wrote to her last month she sent me back a really nice letter promising to look for some pictures for me.  In the meantime, I’m sending her photos of some of the puzzling wallpaper in this house to see if she remembers any of it, and also some photos of the clothing I found that must have belonged to her family. 

 Stay tuned for blog posts about replacing our storm windows, upgrading our furnace and adding A/C, a recap of the March Des Moines Rehabbers Club meeting, and much much more!  That’s all for the news.  Film at eleven.

[tags]neighborhood history, wallpaper[/tags]

This weekend, one of my new friends, Dan, came over to help work on the house. Dan’s a librarian (as I hope to be someday!) and appreciates learning about history through learning about my house. We actually got some work done while Dan was here, but once I started on a project in the basement, we got a little sidetracked. I’ll come back to that.

I can’t believe I’m still working on that first door I started stripping, but I am, and I know how to do it more efficiently the next time around. I didn’t get all the paint off the carved edges with the heat gun so I asked Dan to apply some CitriStrip to the areas where there was still paint around the edges. While he did that, Brandon installed our new gas dryer. The heating element went out on the one my uncle gave us and the belt broke on the one that was in the house when we bought it, so rather than pay just about the same amount to repair either one of those, we bought a new one at Sears. I can’t believe how quiet it is! Brandon did a great job, even getting creative with duct tape to make a different sized vent tube fit the existing vent hole. Red Green would be proud.

Meanwhile, I started work on another round of insulating the basement walls. If you remember at the beginning of winter I put some foam insulation around the cracks in windows and spaces in the foundation. There was a large amount of cloth stuffed into an area of the coal room that I just assumed was to keep the coal dust from traveling into other parts of the house. Well, I was wrong about that (and it was really an assumption made out of laziness. I didn’t want to have to deal with pulling down those rags.) The rags were actually put there originally to keep out drafts. When my sister’s boyfriend came over last weekend, he laughed and pointed out a bad gap in the foundation. “Why would you go to all the trouble of putting foam around the window when you’ve got daylight coming in over the foundation?” Well, that’s what comes of having tall people around to give me better perspective. From his point of view he was seeing a gap several inches wide that was leading directly out to the front yard.

Pretty embarrassing. So this weekend I added to my list another round of insulating.

Here are the rags stuffed into the crack.

As I started pulling them down one by one I realized that these were mostly whole pieces of clothing. They had rips and tears, but were pretty much intact. The first couple of pieces turned out to be a woman’s slips that she’d wear under a dress. I tried to guess from the cut of the slips when they were from. They had that beautiful “on the bias” shape and so I figured they must be from the 30s or 40s. The next pieces I pulled down were baby clothes: a felt jacket with a safety pin still attached, a little girl’s dress sized for a two year old, and a pair of button-up pajamas with an elastic flap in the back for using the toilet. There was a large wrap-around summer dress in a bright red floral print that must have belonged to the mother of the family, and a dirty old pair of jeans that must have been the father’s.

Dirty old jeans:

Mother’s apron (top right) and baby’s felt jacket:

Little girl’s dress:

Little girl’s pajamas:

Father’s boxer shorts:

After I got the clothing down, I unwrapped a water pipe that had been bound in denim and newspaper. To my delight, the newspaper was in excellent condition and was largely intact. There were two dates on the newspaper: 1934 and 1942.

Dan caught me taking a few minutes to read the news from 1934.

After all the fun we had in the basement, we went upstairs to work in slightly warmer conditions. Dan and Brandon scraped wallpaper in the hallway while I wet sanded some of the plaster in the front bedroom.

Also, I scraped another little section of the dining room floor. Inch by inch, we’re getting this house done!

This weekend my college friend, Chantell came to visit. She’s from Chicago and is going to grad school at Syracuse. She took the train all the way from Syracuse to Chicago for the holidays, and took the train from Chicago to here for a weekend visit. As soon as we made plans for her to come, she asked me, “Do I get to help work on the house?” Clearly, she had no idea what she was getting herself into! But Chantell’s a good sport and is one of those crazy people (like me) who can find fun in even the most mundane and tedious tasks, so we put on the radio, sang some crazy songs, and got some work done around the house.

First she finished up the last bit of scraping wallpaper in the front bedroom:

While she did that I helped Brandon take the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. (More on that in a little bit.) Next I helped Chantell scrub the walls to get the last of the wallpaper residue off and get them clean and prepped for plaster patching. There aren’t any pictures of me helping with this part, but I was there! She’ll vouch for me.

Look what a difference washing the wall made! The paint almost looks nice enough to leave alone! The spot in the middle has been scrubbed.

In this picture, the left wall has been scrubbed, the right wall has not. Like you needed me to tell you that anyway.

While Chantell and I were scrubbing, Brandon took the closet door off its hinges and took all the hardware off the woodwork so I can start stripping the paint. Apparently, when the previous owners put up a new style of curtains, they never removed the old hardware, just added more and more brackets, hooks, and screws as they went. So here’s the bag full of hardware he took off two windows:

Some of the brackets had been painted over multiple times. Here’s Brandon’s screwdriver and putty knife stuck behind one bracket:

He also took the register off the heat duct and removed the hardware from the door so I could put them into ammonia and soak the paint off.

When the previous owners were getting ready to put up the wallpaper, someone scratched some math problems on the wall in pencil.

Like I said before, Brandon and I also took the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. This project was a BEAST! First of all, the thing had been there for like 20 years. It weighs a ton. It leaked condensation all over the window sill, causing water damage to the wood and the plaster below. That will have to be repaired later. Our first challenge was undoing all the crappy insulating they had done all those years ago.

Brandon popped the front cover off so he could get a better grip. What a mess!

After wiggling it around a bit, we figured out it had to go out and not in, so we let go from the inside and let it sag dangerously off the side of the house.

There are no pictures of the next few steps because it took all three of us to get underneath it and haul it down to the ground. I’ll admit, we dropped it the last foot or so. I brought up the dolly and hauled it to the curb.

 We closed the storm window and I cleaned up the inside of the window as best I could.  The paint is all flaking off and the accumulation of dead bugs and cobwebs was disgusting.  But our bedroom is now just a little bit more insulated from the cold.

 Since it was really nice outside on Saturday I took the opportunity to spread some mulch around the back door to cover up the mud back there until we can get a new concrete slab poured.  While Brandon and I were working on that we found the coolest spider underneath a bag of mulch!   

It’s called a Woodlouse Hunter Spider and it only eats what are known around here as “roly-polies.” (They’re known in other places as woodlice, pillbugs, or armadillo bugs.) It’s perfectly harmless to humans, but sure doesn’t look harmless! I looked it up to be sure. I learned a lot about woodlice too! They live in damp places in the dirt and eat decaying plants and wood. You’ll find them under logs, in wood piles, and in this case, under bags of cedar mulch. They are also harmless to humans, but can indicate a dampness problem if they’re found near the foundation of your house. Like earthworms, they help enrich the soil.

EDIT: A kindly reader named Ron informed me that Woodlouse spiders are in fact dangerous sometimes because they are aggressive.  They’ll bite and the bite can be painful and nasty and all sorts of terrible things!  So don’t mess with them.  Thanks Ron!

Ok, moving on from backyard biology…

After we went down the street to Grandma’s and had a Mexican meal that couldn’t be beat, we came back home and I taught Chantell how to use the heat gun.

First, I made sure she was protected from the lead paint fumes.  That meant fitting, adjusting, and testing the respirator.  Hilarity ensued.

Then we got down to the serious business of stripping paint. Here Chantell waits eagerly while I plug in the heat gun.

Chantell listened carefully to instructions.

And watched me demonstrate.

Then I turned her loose!

She almost finished the whole door!

We did have some time to relax this weekend too. The cats got the whole futon to themselves while we were working.

Scratch didn’t mind sharing though.